Driving DaVinci Resolve's Free Edition with Claude, From Inside the App

A developer has created an MCP server that enables Claude Code to control DaVinci Resolve's free edition from inside the app, bypassing the sandbox restrictions that block external scripts. The server runs as a menu script within Resolve, opening a localhost socket to communicate with Claude Code, and exposes 157 tools for editing, color, render, and more. The project is available on GitHub for macOS.

The wall Every MCP server that controls DaVinci Resolve connects to it the same way: a script running outside the app calls into Resolve's scripting API over the network. That works fine on Resolve Studio. On the free edition it doesn't work at all — Lite is sandboxed and blocks any script that isn't launched from inside Resolve itself. The one door left open Free Resolve still runs Python scripts launched from its own Workspace Scripts menu. A menu script gets the resolve object injected for free, can run a long-lived loop, and — because the sandboxed app ships the com.apple.security.network.server entitlement — can open a localhost listening socket. That's the whole trick: the MCP server is the menu script. Claude Code ──HTTP JSON-RPC MCP ──▶ 127.0.0.1:8765/mcp │ server runs INSIDE Resolve │ Workspace Scripts Utility ▼ command queue → main script thread ▼ global resolve object → Resolve API What it gets you 157 tools across editing, color, render, media pool, and Fusion title styling — driven from plain-language requests in Claude Code. Zero dependencies: pure Python standard library, so there's nothing to pip install into Resolve's bundled interpreter. Try it git clone https://github.com/2sem/davinci-resolve-lite-mcp.git cd davinci-resolve-lite-mcp ./install.sh macOS only for now. Full tools reference and demo video in the repo.